Should security votes be banned?

Following reports of billions of naira monthly allocated to state governors as security votes and the position of the government that such provision cannot be subjected to the public scrutiny, Nigerians, describing it as illegal and source of grand corruption, are calling for the abrogation of the practice, report Associate Editor, Sam Egburonu and Assistant Editor, Jide Babalola

FOR some years now, there have been calls for abrogation of security vote for state governors and the president. Way back in 2016, for example, Chief Robert Clarke, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, told newsmen that there was no law that sanctions the payment of security votes to Mr. President and state governors. Describing its continuous release as impunity, Clarke said: “When you look at the history of security vote in Nigeria, you will not find anywhere in the 1999 Constitution that allows security vote to be enjoyed by anybody.”

Many other prominent Nigerians, like Tanko Yakassai, have, at one time or the other, publicly condemned allocation of a special security fund to Nigerian President and state governors, mainly because of the refusal of the governments to subject the said allocation to the usual appropriation and accountability.

The call to ban allocation of security votes generated serious controversy when the Boko Haram attacks became very severe before the 2015 General Election. State governors, after a crucial meeting on the security situation in the country, had demanded for increased security votes to enable them handle the situation. While that call elicited support from some Nigerians, many others said the allocation must be subjected to appropriation and accountability.

The old controversy reemerged recently, when Transparency International (TI), a global watchdog, was quoted as reporting that the Federal Government of Nigeria and state governments together allocated about N241 billion annually under security vote heading. Entitled ‘Camouflaged Cash: How Security Votes Fuel Corruption in Nigeria,’ the report reportedly said the votes surpassed annual combined budgetary funding for the Nigerian Army, Nigeria Air Force and Nigerian Navy. Since then, many unconfirmed figures, ranging into hundreds of millions of naira as a governor’s monthly allocation have been published in various online news media, eliciting outcry and criticism. Even most of the supporters of allocation of special funds to chief executives for security are of the opinion that such fund should be under public or official scrutiny.

But besides insisting that the allocation cannot be subjected to any public audit, because of the nature of the exercise it is used for, Nigerian state chief executives have over the years continued to demand increased security votes, citing increasing violence and high crime rate as justification for the demand. From a meagre one hundred thousand naira (N100,000) during the Nigerian Second Republic, the monthly allocation of security vote for state governors is today in hundreds of millions of naira.

The controversy over the necessity of the allocation received fresh attention following recent unconfirmed media report that the allocation for some state governors may be up to N6billion yearly.

Responding to the development, Second Republic Governor of Kaduna State, Alhaji Balarabe Musa, told The Nation that “it is sad that in spite of continuing criticism, the federal and state governments across Nigeria have continued a very robust sustenance of corruption with the monthly multi-billion Naira security vote allocations along with its opaque disbursements and arbitrary expenditures.”

He informed that in his time as governor, “the entire monthly allocation for security vote was N100, 000 (One hundred thousand Naira Only) which was judiciously disbursed and later accounted for by the office of the Secretary to the State Government.

He lamented that today, “the amount set aside or used as security vote has become very huge and reasonable thereby providing a non-accountable channel for governors to indulge themselves instead of spending it on security.”

Dr. Kingsley Uchenna, a retired civil servant now in private security practice in Lagos, in his response said yesterday that it is the responsibility of the legislatures to ensure that all illegal financial allocations are disallowed. “To me, the blame should be on the laps of our lawmakers. Why should we have any special funds given the state governors to do the same work the police, army and other security agencies are being funded to do? It all amounts to corrupt duplication. Who is fooling who? Nobody is saying that the government should publish their security expenditures on the pages of newspapers. No! But there must be a way of accounting for such a large sum of spending. If there is no way of accounting for it, then, it is really a slush fund which hungry Nigerians must say no to,” he said.

An Abuja-based lawyer, Mr. Kayode Ajulo, in his response said there is nothing in the nation’s constitution to justify allocations for security vote. He re-echoed Alhaji Balarabe Musa’s submission that such humongous funds would have been more productively utilized to provide more personnel, equipment and other resources for the police.

He alleged that the huge security vote allocations have become slush funds that governors use to indulge themselves, their friends and families.

Emphasising that there is nothing in the entire constitution to validate the non-transparent disbursement of funds as security vote, Ajulo, who was the former National Secretary of the Labour Party described it as an “anti-democratic accommodation of corruption.”

As he puts it: “Under Nigeria’s laws, there is nothing like security vote; it is just an issue of nomenclature and I believe that it is a systematic way of hiding under the guise of providing security to create some myth around what those in power are actually doing.

“Now, there is no expenditure that is too big for government to hide under what they call security vote.

“In corporate practice, they hide it under a term called miscellaneous but that is okay because there are some sundries or petty cash expenditures.

“But government makes huge expenditures, including those that were budgeted for and those that were not and there are some that are more of an emergency response but there should be no need to hide any huge expenditure under what they call security vote.

“Even if a governor wants to perpetrate bribery or other serious illegality against democracy and the law, he can make big expenditures under security vote,” he said.

Explaining further, Ajulo said great democracies across the world would find it difficult to accommodate such expenditures to justify governors’ near-whimsical disbursement of huge sums of money in a non-transparent, non-accountable manner.

“All over the world, including the United States from which we pretend to be copy democracy, every expenditure of government, including the coffee that the President of the United States takes in his office, is budgeted for and properly accounted for.

“Despite the highly covert nature of the operation that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden which took years of planning, expenditures were budgeted for and approved; it was under the country’s defense budget.

“It is only here in Nigeria that government hides things under an opaque, secretive security vote because of our corrupt tendencies.

“It is certainly justifiable for Nigerians to rally against continued use of security vote because democracy is about transparency and accountability; once you take those two out of it, there is no true democracy again.

“Our leaders hide under the guise of defending democracy only when it is convenient for them but the greatest test for Nigeria’s democracy today is the non-transparency and non-accountability going on in the name of spending security vote,” the lawyer said.

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